


Perimeter Oscillations

by architeuthis



Category: DC Cinematic Universe
Genre: Action/Adventure, Canon-Typical Violence, Case Fic, F/F, Getting Together, Greek Mythology - Freeform, Mild Gore, Mind Control
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-18
Updated: 2017-08-18
Packaged: 2018-12-14 04:01:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,327
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11775069
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/architeuthis/pseuds/architeuthis
Summary: On the trail of a mythological beast, Diana runs into Lois Lane, who is pursuing her own investigation.





	Perimeter Oscillations

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AceQueenKing](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AceQueenKing/gifts).



"True innovation," Nick Landry said, "always begins by investigating the historic path. By going back to our roots, we move our brand forward, and we change the trajectory of the future. Please join me in welcoming the new, revitalized Qualcuity into your world."

The curtain behind him dropped, and the dais lights came up on the new Qualcuity logo. It was green on white, a sinuous tree split into a dozen branches, which swelled at their ends into shapes that might have been leaves.

It was repulsive. Even the shade of green raised questions. On its tall banner it loomed twice Landry's height; he clapped as he gazed up at it.

Applause rang out around Diana. She cast an eye over the faces that surrounded her, and found enthusiasm, concentration, one person moved to tears, quite a few others clearly more interested in the canape trays than anything that might happen on the dais. No one mirrored her incredulity. Surely she couldn't be the only person in the room with a love of art and beauty—though she'd believe, now, that no one at Qualcuity had that love.

She was still searching when an eddy in the crowd showed her a flicker of red hair, a shoulder, a posture that might have been familiar. Diana took a half-step to shift the head of a waiter out of her line of sight, and saw Lois Lane.

They'd met once, in tragic circumstances; they'd never even truly spoken. Diana had returned to Metropolis only once or twice since that day, and had not thought to run into Lois again. But here she was, eyeing the partygoers around her with the same skepticism that Diana had. She was softly lit by candle- and chandelier-light, and by the reflections of the marble floor. Her gaze caught on Diana's motion. Recognition took a moment to bloom in Lois' expression, but bloom it did.

It was worth a shot.

Diana widened her eyes and pressed her lips together, and shot a disbelieving glance sideways at the dais, at the new logo. Lois' expression wavered, then went carefully blank; then she put a hand quickly to her mouth, to hide a grin that still came through around her eyes. Diana looked away before anyone could discover their little conspiracy, but Lois would certainly see her smile in profile.

Up on the dais, Landry had launched into the second half of his presentation. "... celebratory retreat," he was saying, "to visualize the new direction of Qualcuity in a socially and environmentally conscious environment of collaboration and unification."

Diana let the currents of the ballroom carry her in a slow arc toward Lois Lane. By the time she approached, Lois was in conversation with a man in a tuxedo that placed him a tax bracket or two above most of the attendees. She wore a suit herself, for an effect less formal and more businesslike than most of the other women on the floor: covering the announcement gala, perhaps, though unlike the other reporters Diana had spotted here, she carried no obvious accoutrements of her profession. As she drew close enough to hear their conversation beneath the barrage of corporate jargon from the dais, Diana slowed her pace.

"—here as a friend's plus-one," Lois said, smiling a little. Diana had at first thought her body language was friendly, but heard different in her voice. "Refusing to invite the _Planet_ to your events doesn't magically bar us from the premises, Mr. Galloway."

"Maybe not," Galloway said, "but a restraining order—"

"There she is right now," Lois said, as Diana moved into her field of view again. She held her hand out to Diana; Diana shot her a smile with plenty of raised eyebrow in it, but came to stand alongside Lois.

"Mr. Galloway," she said, "wonderful to finally meet you. I've heard such things. Diana Prince."

"I, uh," Galloway said, taking the hand Diana offered him. She got up close as she shook with him, touched his elbow in a deliberately over-familiar fashion, and while he was distracted by her eye contact, she liberated the security keycard from his belt and hid it in her palm. "Of course," Galloway added vaguely as she withdrew from his personal space.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Galloway, you were saying something just before Diana arrived," Lois said. Her hand was no longer extended, but she let Diana take her arm and tuck it into the crook of her own, which created plenty of terrain in which conceal the card in for now.

Galloway regained enough presence of mind to glance sourly back and forth between them. "You remember perfectly well what I was saying, Ms. Lane."

"Right, something about a restraining order? And I was going to promise you that if you do file one, I will obey it to the _letter_. Now, I'd love to ask you a few questions, but something tells me you aren't interested in going on the record tonight."

"What do you think," Galloway snapped, but Lois was already steering Diana away. Their gazes caught again, and Lois' smile changed. Ah, _that_ was what friendly looked like on her.

"In that case, Mr. Galloway," Lois said without a look back, "I'm afraid we have a party to attend."

* * *

"Thanks for the plausible deniability," Lois muttered when they were out of earshot, leaning into Diana companionably.

Diana's mouth twitched. "There is no friend, is there."

"Good ears," Lois said, which wasn't an answer. "I don't think we've been formally introduced. Lois Lane, of the _Daily Planet_."

"Of course," Diana said. "I've read your work. Diana Prince. I'm a curator for the Louvre."

"Would I—" Lois' mouth went crooked with amusement. "Would I be aware of your—work?"

With the immediate urgency of getting away from Galloway past, Lois' grip on Diana's arm had relaxed. There was no dancing on the ballroom floor at the moment, but they led each other on a slow stroll around its perimeter, and it wasn't _not_ dancing. "I began as a restorer, so if you have an interest in statuary, you may have seen pieces I've worked on."

"Art's not really my field."

"You know enough to have an opinion about—" Diana pointed her chin at the new logo, still commanding the room with its twisty green ugliness.

"It's ... definitely something," Lois said, and Diana fought another grin.

"I also do some work in repatriation, but if you aren't in the art world, there's no reason you would have heard of me."

Lois chuckled, but there were wheels turning behind her expression. "What brings you here tonight, then?"

"I was in town and a friend asked me to vet Nick Landry, who's taken an interest in some ancient Greek items in his collection." Landry was still going on. This sort of speech was so difficult to extract meaning from that Diana found she had trouble telling whether there was any chance of it ending soon.

"Ah, so you aren't involved with Qualcuity." Lois reached for a canape off the tray of a passing waiter, and Diana used that moment of divided attention to spirit Galloway's keycard from under her arm to a safer spot in the bodice of her gown.

"It sounds like that would end this conversation quickly, were it so," Diana said.

"More like you might have to take legal recourse to get rid of me."

"I can't imagine wanting to," Diana said warmly, and watched Lois' expression close up. Her gaze flitted away over the crowd, like she was looking for another escape route.

Oh. Had they not been flirting? Diana looked down at their linked arms. It had been more than two years since their last meeting and the terrible events that precipitated it. Two years was not too long to grieve. Lois had leaned into Diana with such familiarity, with clear knowledge that Diana was strong and would take her weight without swaying—but she was still doing that now, when her face said she wanted to be elsewhere. Maybe that had been more a part of the performance than Diana had realized.

"Unfortunately," Diana said, "I have to get rid of you anyway."

Lois' head jerked up in surprise.

"I hope you'll forgive me, but I need to see about Mr. Landry, and I don't think I'll be able to stay long after that."

"I won't keep you, then," Lois said. "Nice running into you." She began to slip her arm from Diana's, but without either the urgency or the relief Diana had expected.

"It's been a pleasure." Lois' hand still lingered in the crook of her elbow, and on impulse, Diana took it and pressed it between her own. "The next time you need cover at a party, look for me."

"I'll do that." Lois' smile went lopsided again, and she reached into her blazer for a business card. Diana released her hands to accept it, and hid it next to the pilfered keycard. "Enjoy your evening, Ms. Prince."

Lois turned from Diana and walked away from her across the ballroom floor, a small figure with the presence to slice through a crowd.

Diana glanced at the dais. Landry was still going strong, though there had been constant attrition in the attention he commanded since the logo reveal; he spoke, now, over a general murmur of conversation, to a gathering that had taken a great interest in the food and the alcohol.

Things wouldn't be winding down in the immediate future. She had a while to work. Diana selected a door outside Lois' field of view, and slipped out of the ballroom.

* * *

Qualcuity occupied the fifteenth and sixteenth floors of the One Moulton West Tower. Security would be minimal on the fifteenth, and Diana had anticipated finagling her way up to the sixteenth from there. An air duct. An easily impressed employee. Simply scaling the outside of the building, if she had to. Then Lois Lane had come along, and gotten her, however inadvertently, a security pass. Diana pushed the button for the sixteenth floor and swiped Galloway's keycard when the prompt came up.

She tipped her head back and listened to the canned music until the elevator deposited her in Qualcuity's administrative offices.

The quiet went beyond the silence of the after-hours: this was the silence of drinks downstairs on the company tab. The offices were a shadowy glass maze that echoed with Diana's footsteps. Placards led her past rooms full of modernist furniture and blandly tasteful corporate-deco sculpture to the door with Landry's name on it.

She closed the blinds for the tenuous cover they provided in this fishbowl, then sat at the desk and rifled through the drawers while she waited for the computer to warm up. When the login screen appeared, Diana fished a USB stick out of her bodice and plugged it into the keyboard. The release button on the flash drive was shaped like a bat. Not for the first time, Diana suppressed a sigh.

A dialogue box came up over the login screen: _INTRUSION METHOD 1 ATTEMPT 0%_. The percentage ticked up slowly; data scrolled below it that wasn't completely nonsensical to Diana, but close enough that her time would be better spent looking at something else. She picked the lock on a file cabinet.

Then the lock on a second. Then a third. Diana rifled through maps, legal documents, architectural plans, resumes, memos, reports. Numerous drafts of the horrible new logo, most of them less bad than the final choice. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary, but a thorough examination of every document in this office would keep her here all night. The hack attempt crawled toward 100%. Diana settled for tapping the remaining cabinets and listening for unexpected hollowness, and was re-checking the desk drawers with an eye for hidden compartments when she heard a tread on the wood floor outside the office.

Diana turned off the monitor and sat a moment in the dark, listening. It was a quick, step that moved purposefully, fell silent a moment, then rang out again. Diana had made her way through the offices in the same fashion, pausing to read a door placard and then moving to the next. And she'd last heard the sound of that pair of flats not twenty minutes ago.

No, that was wishful thinking. Lois hadn't been the only woman in flats downstairs, and there was no reason to assume this person had come from announcement ball in the first place.

The door, at least, was opaque. Diana rose and stood behind it, where she'd be better hidden than she had been in the desk chair. The footsteps proceeded along a familiar route, and as they approached the door of Landry's office, Diana held her breath and closed her hand on the knob. A moment later, another hand jiggled the knob from the other side; Diana held it still enough to create the appearance that the door was locked.

Another jiggle. The person on the other side of the door abandoned that quickly, though, and in a moment Diana both heard and felt through her hand another recent sensation: a pick entering a lock.

All right. Diana and this other intruder were on equal footing, at least. That might mean they were also on the same side. She stepped back from the door and opened it. 

Lois Lane looked up at Diana. She was on one knee, her lockpicks still raised. Diana beamed down at her.

"The art world must be more interesting than I had realized," Lois said.

"This is nothing," Diana said. "A man once absconded with a sheaf of pristine seventeenth-century vellum and I had to tackle him in the street."

Lois snorted, and accepted a hand up from Diana. "Are you going to square with me now?"

Diana backed away from the door so that Lois could join her in Landry's office. "It may strain credulity."

"I know who you are, Ms. Prince, and I've had a foot in that world myself." Lois closed the door behind herself, so gently the click was almost inaudible, as though they still might be overheard in this deserted office. "There's nothing you can say that I won't believe."

"I've been following the spoor of a great serpent." Diana turned the monitor back on and briefly tipped it toward herself to see the screen. The dialogue box currently read _INTRUSION METHOD 2 ATTEMPT 13%_. "It laired below this tower once, but it's moved on."

Lois paused. "Great, like ... how great?" She made a hoop of her hands, suggesting the diameter of a snake the size of a large python, then an anaconda, then, eyebrows rising, a car tire, when Diana still only shook her head.

"From the size of the skin I found, very much larger than that."

"I don't think I like this," Lois said.

"It's of great concern. I don't think it's taken a human life, and maybe it won't. But I need to meet it and understand its intentions, and thus far it's been very elusive for a beast that size. Now." Diana perched on the edge of the desk and leaned toward Lois. "What are _you_ doing here?"

"I'm—" Lois laughed a little. "Stop me if this is too much to believe, but Qualcuity has made a lot of weird real estate purchases in the last year. Low-income housing, mostly. They just bulldoze everything and let the plots sit empty. I'm trying to find out what they're up to."

Diana frowned. "So you came straight to Nick Landry's office."

"Everything I've got right now says the whole thing is his brainchild. No one below him on the ladder has any idea what he's doing, and no one above him seems to care."

"Of all the people who work in this building, he was also the only one who displayed an interest when my friend put some serpent-related artifacts on the market."

Lois frowned as well now. "There's no way whatever scam this guy running has something to do with a _giant snake_."

"Maybe he has his finger in more than one pie. Or maybe he just has an interest in antiquities, and has no relationship with the serpent. That's what I'm here to—"

A chime from Landry's computer cut Diana off. She circled the desk and looked at the screen: _INTRUSION SUCCESSFUL_. Tapping a key brought up Landry's desktop.

"This is fancy," Lois said at her shoulder. "I wouldn't have figured you for a hacker."

"You'd be right. A friend helped me with this."

"Is this the same friend with the artifacts?"

Diana just smiled at her.

"All right, don't tell me." Lois didn't seem particularly daunted. "I'm in no position to bargain for information here," she went on, gesturing at the computer, "but—"

"Why don't you go through that," Diana said, pointing at the computer as well. "Now that we've spoken, I'd like another look at Mr. Landry's filing cabinets."

Diana pulled a fistful of manila folders from one of the drawers she'd already been through, and sat on the edge of the desk again. Lois hesitated, but she pulled up the desk chair and sat; Diana glanced up just as Lois put her hands to the keyboard, and saw the little pleased crook to her mouth.

* * *

"This guy is incredibly cagey," Lois said into a long silence. "Most people who get this far up the corporate ladder can't resist spraying their thoughts everywhere."

Diana snorted. "He seemed so verbose downstairs," she said, turning a computer printout around in her hands. But Lois wasn't wrong: Landry's physical files never directly described whatever project entailed these real estate purchases, and if it had a name, it never came up. She found a deed here, a bill for a wrecking company there, always in odd places, like they were misfiled.

"That's not what his emails sound like. Some marketing hack with a degree in buzzwords probably wrote it." Lois was a rapid typist; the keyboard rattled under her hands. "It looks like he was starting to get real pushback about his buy-and-bulldoze scheme from the higher-ups, but he's just deflecting, deferring.... 'Mom said I could do it, Dad; Dad said I could do it, Mom.'"

"So, if he is colluding with the serpent—"

"Oh my god," Lois muttered, and Diana grinned.

"If he is the one in league with it, we need only investigate him, not the entire administrative structure of a small corporation."

"And maybe this exposé—whatever it's actually about—just brings down Landry, not the entire company."

"That sounds— Here! I thought I'd seen something like this." Diana unfolded a map on the desktop, and pinned its corners down with a mug full of pens and an ugly Qualcuity-branded paperweight. "Does this look familiar to you?"

Lois' hand stroked the paper. In the wan light of the monitor, circles of red marker pockmarked Metropolis and its environs. "This is it exactly. Qualcuity owns most of these, and they've bulldozed most of the ones they own. Not the one in upper midtown; they're having a fight with the National Register of Historic Places about it. This one down here I'd have to check my notes about."

"Look how the major thoroughfares connect them," Diana said, following the curve of an expressway with her fingernail. Lois looked, then looked back at Diana without comprehension, so Diana plucked a blue marker from the pen cup and traced the same road out again in ink, then another. The line stretched and curled across the city, first in a great arc, then a series of involutions tucked within that perimeter, like a pile of rope, or the contours of a brain, or the coils of a serpent that could embrace the world.

"It's a maze," Lois said as the shape emerged. "Or a—labyrinth?"

"A labyrinth," Diana said. She drew a head on the serpent at the center of the pattern, with the red circle of a demolished apartment block for its eye, then gave it a little flicking tongue. Lois' mouth tilted; then she schooled her expression.

"I don't know what this means. Landry is trying to trap the snake? Like—" Lois sighed. "Not to sound like a tourist, but, like the Minotaur?"

"Not quite. Daedalus' labyrinth had so many branches even he could have gotten lost in it."

"I thought you were going to tell me that ... never happened, or something."

"It can be hard to judge with legends," Diana said, capping the marker.

"I bet." Lois laughed just a little. "All right, so, if it isn't a trap—"

"It's a ritual labyrinth. The supplicant begins here, at Fortieth and Grant." Diana placed her finger at the outermost end of the line, the tip of the tail. "They walk the path—or drive it, maybe—and at each of these stations they're prepared somehow. They take a vow, or they divest themselves of a worldly item, or they learn a secret, or they're bodily purified. Maybe some combination of the above. And at last they come to the center."

Lois' eyes followed Diana's circumambulating fingertip to the serpent's head. "To ... be eaten."

"Maybe, but I hope not," Diana said.

"Me too," Lois said. She leaned back in the desk chair. "This was supposed to be a normal corporate corruption story," she said, staring up at the ceiling. "I'm not sure how I'm going to pitch _local startup transforms Metropolis into gigantic snake temple and buffet_ to my boss."

Diana grinned, but before she could reply she heard a sharp noise from outside the office: the click of a shoe on the wood floor of the hallway. 

Lois sat bolt upright in the desk chair. "Why is this place so busy tonight?"

"Is it too much to imagine a third investigation converging here just now?"

"Let's not count on it." Lois snatched up the paperweight from the corner of the map and stood.

While Lois crept to the door, Diana punched the off button on Landry's monitor—the room went dark—and shoved all the files she'd disturbed back into their drawers. The newcomer was much closer than Lois had been when Diana had first heard her—not by dint of stealth, but because the two of them had been so busy talking. Now that she was looking, Diana saw the flicker of a flashlight through the blinds. Burglar? Or—

"That's a security guard," Lois hissed. "Coming our way. Might've seen the light from the monitor."

"So we can't just hide and hope they don't spot us." Diana glanced up again, and saw for herself the irregularly bobbing brightness of a handheld flashlight through the blinds. The guard was a half-dozen paces from the door of Landry's office. Diana hastily refolded the map, and was about to find a place for it down the front of her gown when she recalled that Lois must have pockets inside her jacket.

"Probably not." Lois took a deep breath. "All right. You open the door, and when she comes through, I'll knock her out." She looked at Diana and blinked. "Actually, you're probably better at—"

"I have an idea," said Diana.

"Right, don't you have a rope that makes people—"

She cut off when Diana pulled her away from the door and turned her around. The inside of Lois' jacket _did_ have pockets; Diana tucked the map into one, next to a shape that might have been a wallet or a cell phone.

Through the glass came a muffled voice: "Is someone in there? Mr. Landry?"

Diana pushed Lois backward until the desk stopped them. Lois turned her face up toward Diana, and Diana cupped her jaw.

The security guard knocked on the door. "Mr. Landry?"

At the last moment, with the doorknob behind her already rattling under the hand of the guard, Diana hesitated. But Lois wasn't eyeing the exits this time; her eyes were fixed on Diana's face, and when Diana ran a thumb down her cheek, she rose onto her toes and her lips parted. The little catch of her breath was just audible.

Diana forgot her ruse, forgot the guard, and just kissed Lois.

She met Diana's mouth urgently, and arched toward her with such abandon that Diana at once picked her up and rested her on the edge of the desk. They were closer in height this way, but Lois still locked her arms around Diana's neck with such sinewy determination that Diana thought Lois might climb her body until their height disparity was fully erased. Diana ran her hands down Lois' thighs and, through the wool of her suit trousers, felt them clench when she leaned into Lois, when she kissed her more deeply.

" _Excuse me_?" the security guard said from the doorway. It wasn't the first thing she'd said. It might have been the third.

Lois pulled away first. Diana would have been entirely willing to just keep kissing her indefinitely, and when that proved an impractical goal she pressed her face into Lois' shoulder and breathed in her good smells.

"Um," Lois said, over Diana's shoulder. Diana glanced up without raising her head much; Lois' eyes were bright, her face flushed. "Can we help you?"

"Ma'ams, you aren't allowed to be here."

"Oh," Lois said, brushing a strand of her hair back into place. Her legs were still around Diana's hips, and Diana had to remind herself not to dig her fingers into them. Every inch of skin not covered by Diana's gown wanted Lois' hands. "We were just looking for some privacy. Nick wouldn't mind."

"Be that as it may, I'm going to have to ask you to leave."

"I guess we'd better head back downstairs." Lois patted Diana's shoulder briskly. As she disengaged from Lois, Diana ran her parted lips and the tip of her nose along Lois' jaw, and felt the tension that ran through her, the breath that expanded her ribs. Lois put her feet on the floor and adjusted her jacket, gripping it just where the pocket with the map was.

"I'm going to have to ask you to leave _the building_ ," the guard said. "This is private property. You're lucky I don't involve the police."

"I'm sure that won't be necessary," Diana said. She rolled her eyes, tried to play the embarrassed counterpoint to Lois' brazenness. Acting had never come easily to Diana, but her performance seemed to be enough for this guard, a woman in a short-sleeved uniform who clearly had no interest in prolonging this conversation.

"It won't be, because I'm about to escort both of you to the door."

"We can find our way downstairs just fine," Lois said, closing her hand conspiratorially around Diana's wrist.

"No, ma'am. I can't have either of you 'getting lost' on the way out. Please collect your things if you've got any, and follow me."

* * *

It was a long elevator ride down to the ground floor. Diana and Lois stood side by side behind the security guard. For several floors no eye contact was made, until Diana brushed the back of Lois' hand with her fingers.

Lois caught her breath, but there was no responding touch, because, as Diana learned when she looked down from the ceiling, Lois was already holding something: the paperweight she'd intended to knock out the guard with. It was a big lump of clear acrylic with the new Qualcuity logo on it in that same awful color: the twisting tree with its swollen branches. Either their security guard wasn't sharp-eyed, or this was the end result of some deft misdirection by Lois; from the way her mouth went a little crooked when Diana looked back up at her face, probably the latter. Lois tucked her hand behind her back.

The guard let them visit the coatroom and then ejected them onto the street with the same brusque indifference she'd shown them up in Landry's office. Their path never took them back through the ballroom.

"Well." Lois pulled her overcoat tight around herself. "I would have liked another shot at the hors d'oeuvres, but at least I didn't give Galloway the satisfaction of seeing me kicked off Qualcuity property. Or the legal ammunition." The paperweight made a round bulge in her coat pocket.

"He wouldn't have seen you," Diana said. "All of the executives were leaving for a retreat at midnight, and that's well past."

"Jesus," Lois said, looking at her watch. "You're right. I should be getting home if I intend to show my face at the office tomorrow."

"I could give you a lift," Diana said promptly.

Lois started; then her gaze skittered away from Diana. Metropolis' business district emptied out after dark, leaving them alone apart from light traffic: no crowd to merge into, but plenty of directions to leave in. In a way, a major city street was nothing _but_ exits. "I'm actually parked just a few blocks that way. So, thanks, but—"

"Of course." They stood in silence for a moment. It would have been nice to kiss Lois goodbye. "How are you planning to follow up on this?"

"I hardly know where to start," Lois said. "You said you found a skin? Where does something the size of this thing hide in a city—underground?"

Diana nodded. "Much of any great city is below ground. I found the skin in an abandoned subway terminal, but I think it had burrowed in from the old sewer system."

"As in ... through concrete?"

"It's possible the hole was already there."

"Well, let's hope." Lois' face glowed pale in the light of the nearby streetlamp. "I guess that's my next step. Where was this?"

"It used to be the Jackson street terminal, below the intersection with Seventh. But I think it has moved on from there. If you mean to search for the lair, I should go with you."

"Look, that's very nice of you," Lois said, holding her hands up like a wall between the two of them, "but I can take care of myself."

"I don't doubt you," Diana said. "I've seen your bravery for myself." Bringing up their first meeting, that awful night and Lois' terrible loss, was probably not wise, but it seemed to close the distance between them again; Lois let her hands drop back to her sides. "But if we're searching for the same thing, there's no reason to search separately, and if you confront it, you may need a translator."

"You're expecting it to _talk_?"

"The ancient beasts often do."

"You know what," Lois said, "I'm going to stop being surprised by this stuff. You're the expert. How do you hunt a giant snake?"

"You learn the places it likes and the things it wants, and you go where the two coincide."

"It sounds a lot like you just said 'the same way you hunt any snake' to me."

"Does it?" Diana rubbed her chin thoughtfully.

"All right, don't be cute."

"Was I?"

"You're spending your capital fast."

"We don't know what prey this one prefers, but we know it likes tunnels and caves, and that Mr. Landry is building it a labyrinth."

"So it's probably at the center of that map you made." Lois reached under her coat and blazer for the map, which she unfolded and refolded to show Diana's drawing of the serpent's head. "Or somewhere along it. If we start at the beginning—"

"Walking the labyrinth could be dangerous," Diana said. "Spiritually, not just because an enormous serpent might try to eat us. But you're right. Even if it isn't at the center, we cover the same ground by starting there and working our way outward."

"I have no idea what sort of infrastructure there might be underground there."

"Nor have I! We'll have to explore."

"Okay, slow down, there." Lois tucked the map back into her jacket; Diana vividly recalled putting it there in the first place, of Lois' warmth and proximity and how sweetly her mouth had opened. "How about I get my nightly three hours and then do a little research in the morning. Figure out if there's an easy way into whatever's under there."

"A fine idea," Diana said, still distracted, then cleared her throat and made herself focus. "You said you were going to work; shall I contact you at the end of the business day?" As eager as she'd been to kiss Diana, Lois did not seem to appreciate Diana's smaller advances, so Diana tried to make producing Lois' business card from between her breasts as unflirtatious a gesture as possible.

Lois' raised eyebrow suggested mixed success. "Sounds good. Call the cell phone number on there, not the desk number."

"I will." Diana tucked the card away again. "I was very pleased to see you tonight, Lois."

"I...." Lois bit her lip, and Diana could not have said whether this hesitation came from whatever her reservations were about this situation, or if she was, like Diana, remembering. "You too," she said at last. "Have a good night."

The click of her shoes and the bright flag of her hair receded from Diana, into the cool Metropolis night.

* * *

"I kind of expected you to be wearing street clothes," Lois said. She rose from her perch, on one of the low walls that would once have funneled cars down into this parking garage. "Do you have the whole armor getup on under that?"

"Best to be prepared for— What is that face?"

"I'm trying to decide whether you in jeans would actually have been less conspicuous than you in a cloak." Lois had worn jeans herself, with duck boots and a canvas jacket. A camera hung from her neck, and objects bulged in her pockets.

"I'm told not," Diana said. This sidewalk wasn't busy, but she was still getting looks. The looks were just different when she dressed more like the people around herself. 

"Not if you were still really obviously wearing a sword under there, anyway," Lois said, and laughed. "God, you're surreal. Just ... you, existing, doing normal you things. I'd sort of forgotten what that was like to be around." She cut off, as though she'd struck some nerve with her own words, and her expression closed up all at once. 

Diana watched Lois thoughtfully. "It won't matter underground," she said, and gestured at the closed gate of the garage. The high-rise that loomed above them was stripped of its glass and most of its cladding, streaked with rust, crisscrossed with spraypaint. Crime scene tape flapped from a windowframe on the second floor. Qualcuity had turned people out of their homes only to tear them down, but this empty building still stood. "I don't know how you learned of this place."

"You can pick up a lot of tips about how to get to places you aren't supposed to be from urban exploration forums. And maybe a story, if you read carefully."

"I'd like to hear about that sometime," Diana said.

"Hmm." Human-sized access doors stood on either side of the garage gates; Lois jiggled the one nearest her. "My source was nonspecific about how to get inside. Well, _tauntingly vague_ might be more accurate. She's a big free climber, so she may have gone in through a window and then worked her way down."

"Allow me," Diana said, leaning around her, and snapped the handle off.

"Okay, that's more my speed." Lois pushed the door open and stepped inside.

A dusty security kiosk let them out into the garage proper. This was the first one Diana had seen completely empty of both cars and activity, lit only by its unglazed windows and the flashlight Lois produced from her pocket. It felt cavernous and secret, insulated from Metropolis' evening bustlings by its own concrete walls. Lois swung the beam of her flashlight across its square pillars and graffitied walls, and led the way down the sloping asphalt, between the rows of empty spaces.

On the second floor down, the structure began to show its age: there was was wet here, and cracks, and places where roots had burst in through the walls. The light faded behind them.

On the third floor there was a smell.

"Do you ..." Lois began, putting her hand to her nose.

"I do. That scent is what you imagine it to be." It was an oily, rotten stench. For now it was tolerable, but when they drew closer to the source, Diana knew, it would pry at the senses even if they were careful to breathe only through their mouths. "I last smelled this near the shed skin I mentioned. You and your camera may be in luck."

"I'm not sure I want to be, if that's what luck smells like," Lois said, but she was searching the corners minutely with her flashlight now.

The beam came to a quivering halt on the far end of the floor, the lowest point of the garage, when it passed over a scree of broken concrete and disturbed earth. It was still a moment; then Lois jerked it upward to illuminate a massive, irregular hole in the wall, half-refilled with rubble and dirt.

"Oh my god," she said, "there really is a snake."

"Did you imagine I would invent a serpent where there was none?" said Diana, amused.

"'Giant snake' just isn't the world I live in," Lois said, but she was walking slowly toward the hole, taking it in with her flashlight.

"It's everyone's world. It just hides well." Diana closed her hand over Lois' on the flashlight, long enough to direct the beam toward a streak dried onto the asphalt, a long brown curve with a kink at the end from some flick of the beast's body. "This is what you smell."

"Is that shit?"

"Fluid from a gland. Small snakes deter predators like this. It may want to discourage visitors."

"Bet it works," Lois said. She wasn't breathing through her nose, but she had not slowed her approach, and in profile, Diana saw the fascination on her face. "Hey, would you hold this?"

Diana accepted the flashlight from Lois, picked out features of the hole and the rubble around it for her to photograph.

"These are awful," Lois muttered to herself, backing away for a wider vantage. "Jenny's going to make fun of me. Hey, can I get one of you—"

Diana had been leaning in to touch the mounded detritus in the hole, testing its stability. The flashlight showed her a short slope downward into a space on the other side with loose dirt walls, and no end the beam could reach. She glanced up at Lois, directly into the camera's flash, and had to blink her eyes clear.

"Yeah, that's perfect," Lois said, looking at the screen of her camera. "Jesus, that's the best one I've taken. Okay, according to the maps, there are drainage tunnels to the west and south of this garage. I'm kind of turned around—"

"This is the west wall. How far do they extend?"

"This system stretches all the way out into the 'burbs. There's another system for the east side, drains into the bay. They don't connect, but it doesn't seem like this thing cares about walls."

"We may have a long way to go, then," Diana said. She vaulted into the dirt tunnel and pulled the trailing hem of her cloak through behind herself. From this side, she could see the curves in the earth made by the serpent as it maneuvered in this space; the blockage in the tunnel mouth had been pushed there by the creature's body. The ceiling dropped dirt on her head, but it was high enough for her to stand straight.

Diana reached back through the opening to help Lois through.

* * *

The passage let into one of the promised drainage tunnels after a few dozen yards. There was water here—a pervasive wet, a smell of algae and city grime in the cold damp air—but it ran in a channel down the center of the tunnel, and a walkway along either side kept their feet dry. If it had rained more recently than last Tuesday, they would have been wading. Rubble sloped down into the water from the end of the tunnel; the current must never have been strong enough to wash it away, though it had pulled the outline of the pile out into a shape that pointed downstream.

Lois walked backward from the end of the serpent's tunnel, snapping more photos. A fist-sized lump of concrete turned under her heel, and she staggered, then righted herself. Diana reached out to steer her before she could fall or pitch herself into the water. After a few paces on this new course, she bumped full-length into Diana. Lois lowered her camera, but didn't move away.

"Cold down here," she said; Diana wasn't sure whether she was just talking, or if this was an invitation to—well, a glorified sewer wasn't the place, anyway.

"This direction," Diana said, and led the way upstream. The serpent's warning smell was immediately less intense.

"How do you tell?"

Diana still held Lois' flashlight; she played it along the edge of the walkway. "Do you see these scratches? The serpent is too wide to fit into the central channel or doesn't care to, and when it overlaps the walkway, it drags the broken concrete with it, which leaves these marks. It may have come from the other direction when it dug this hole, but it went this way when it left."

"So this kind of thing is how you found that shed skin in the first place?"

"This and a few other methods. A rumor. A request from a friend that I look into an anomaly."

"You mention this _friend_ a lot."

"I didn't mean to give the impression it was a single person. I have many contacts."

"How many of them are Batman?"

Diana grinned in the dark. "Not more than half."

* * *

Three turnings later, another of the serpent's tunnels opened through a concrete wall into wet earth. A long strip of shed skin hung like a flag in the ad-hoc doorway, caught on a length of broken rebar. Lois' camera clicked again and again as she clambered over the rubble; when she reached the streamer she touched it hesitantly, then pulled it down. The scales were as large as her palm. She traced the edges of them with her fingers, first on the battered exterior, then on the smooth, iridescent inward side.

"Why does it split like this?"

"It may have torn coming off," Diana said, but came closer to look. Lois had been right to think something was amiss: the skin did split, but it curved and ruffled around that split like a pelt did at an animal's armpit or groin, anywhere the skin expanded to cover complex topography. Past the split, the scales were much smaller.

Lois let Diana take the skin from her, sniffed her own hands warily, then put one of them in the pocket of her jacket—the one with the largest bulge in it. "Don't, uh—look, I don't know anything about snakes, but this couldn't be the skin off its _tongue_ , could it? Snakes just have normal tongues. Apart from the shape."

"Snakes just have normal tongues," Diana agreed. "Perhaps it has legs?"

Lois laughed, then bit the sound off sharply. "I don't know why I thought you were joking. That's no weirder than it being the size of a bus. It's some sort of primeval, prehistoric, mythological...." She trailed off, and her expression gradually sobered. Her hand worked in her pocket. "I might have an idea."

"Go ahead," Diana said.

The pocket lump was the paperweight from last night, an irregular clear shape that refracted the logo on its underside. It was no more attractive that way, or by the light of the flashlight Diana was still holding for Lois, than it had been on a banner.

"I keep thinking about this logo," Lois said, holding it up to the light.

"Why bring this with you here?"

"I've had it in my pocket all day. Who knows, I'm hunting a giant snake with Wonder Woman, I might need to rush in and heroically brain a guy with it. Anyway, I keep thinking, what if it's not a tree?"

"Lois, do you feel drawn to this logo?" The faces of the crowd in the ballroom came back to Diana, their smiles, their applause. A roomful of people and none of them seemed the least put off by this ugly logo. Not one except Lois, probably the only person in that room other than Landry who had had an introduction into the world Diana inhabited. She re-aimed the flashlight to better illuminate Lois' face, and watched her pupils contract.

"No, it's terrible. I just ... really, really want to ... talk to people about how bad it is. Like it's _importantly_ ugly. But that's not why I— What if it's not a tree?"

Diana put her hand over Lois' on the paperweight and pulled the logo a little closer to her face. She'd looked at this design a dozen times since last night: the sinuous trunk, the bulbous ends of its many branches.

"It's the serpent," she said.

"And it's got a dozen heads," Lois agreed.

* * *

Signs of the beast's passage led them through dripping miles of tunnel. They emerged once into a decommissioned subway station, once in a storage sub-basement, and finally into a grassy drainage ditch, where a bent, burst grating gave them their first glimpse of the sky in hours. The sun had set; in all directions they were surrounded by carefully landscaped hills and the back-sides of mansions, but beyond a nearby stretch of forest, Metropolis rose bright against the night sky. The intestinal reek the snake left wherever a human might find its burrow was strong here, but Diana stopped where she was anyway, tipped her head back to the stars, and conferred for a moment with the slow turning of the world.

"Jesus." Lois was looking at her phone, half-laughing. Diana caught a glimpse of her map app; her GPS had been spotty underground, but it must be working now. "Landry's estate should be just over that rise. Unbelievable. We spend hours hunting a snake in the sewers and it turns out he's, what, keeping it in his basement?"

"Does he have multiple homes, or is this the same estate where the retreat is taking place?"

"Oh my god, he's going to feed the entire administration of Qualcuity to the Hydra," Lois said, scrambling up the side of the ditch.

Diana caught her by the tail of her coat. Lois whipped around and grabbed the wrist of the offending hand, but Diana could not be dislodged.

"Diana—"

"I know," Diana said. "But if we rush in and give ourselves away, the serpent may flee into some other tunnel, and we could be hunting it for still more hours. And—I'm not sure it wants these people to eat."

Lois frowned, but her hand relaxed on Diana's wrist, and her mind seized on this idea like it had on everything else Diana had placed before her. "If not food ... servants? Or—the whole labyrinth thing, what if that's not about food, what if it's more like a temple?"

"Exactly. It exerts force on the mind through its symbols. It's building a place for ritual that nearly spans a city. If it isn't a god, I think it may want to be."

"And if it uses the same—whatever it put in the paperweight—to turn all the execs into worshippers," Lois said, warming to this line of thought, "the higher-ups get off Landry's back about building its temple."

"Hmm. May I see that paperweight?"

It had made its way unremarked back into Lois' pocket down in the drainage tunnels, in the perpetual juggling of flashlight, camera, and phone. The object itself had seemed less important than the revelation it had provided; Diana had barely thought about it since. Lois fished it from inside her jacket and put it in Diana's waiting hand.

Diana turned, drew back, and with every ounce of strength in her arm, threw the paperweight into the sky. It would sail over Metropolis and land in the bay, if she judged the arc right.

"No!" blurted Lois, and dashed in the direction of Diana's throw. Diana caught her before she had gone more than two paces; she struggled against Diana's restraining arms for just an instant, then subsided, breathing hard. 

"Okay," she said. "I'm okay. God, this is so strange. I've never felt anything like that." She hadn't released Diana's forearms, and Diana hadn't released _her_ ; her body fit neatly into the curve of Diana's, and a lock of hair that was trying to escape her bun tickled the corner of Diana's mouth. Neither of them smelled quite how Diana preferred, but everything else about this was enticing.

"Are you all right to continue?"

"Of course," Lois said. She pushed Diana's hands away, finally, and straightened, adjusting her jacket; a sliver of skin that had shown at the back of her neck disappeared. "Let's go check out Landry's snake basement house party."

"I promise the story is yours whether you come with me to the house or not."

"It's not about the story." Lois paused. "I mean. It is very much about the story, but it's about several other things now too. One of them is those people and their minds, and another is not having wasted God knows how many hours in a hole in the ground just to back out when things got scary—and I don't see what's so funny—"

"Not funny," Diana said, as she started up the slope. "Delightful."

* * *

A seven-foot stone wall bordered the Landry estate. Diana hopped up onto the quietest, farthest corner of it; as she hoisted Lois up beside herself and lowered her into the bushes on the inside of the wall, she took in the lay of the land with half an eye.

The grounds were an undulating greensward, crisscrossed with stone footpaths and dotted with tents. Nick Landry had one of those ungainly mansions that seemed tacked onto its own enormous garage; lots of space, but not enough for every administrator at Qualcuity. Each white tent was large enough to sleep several people, and shaped like a geodesic dome: Diana's first thought was of a snake's round, leathery eggs. The door-flaps on a few of them hung open, and people circulated between them, most in casual clothes, a few in pajamas, many holding drinks. Torches and strings of bulbs lit the yard. From outside they'd been a hazy glow in the dark sky.

"Oh my god," she heard Lois mutter below her, "cult glamping."

Diana hopped down and crouched beside her amid the pleasant pine smells of Landry's landscaping. "Street clothes might have been in order after all. I can't blend in here."

"I can," Lois said, unslinging her camera. "Why don't I take a look around."

She hung the strap of the camera around Diana's neck. Her hands rested for a moment on Diana's shoulders. Diana put her own hands over them and Lois stilled, looking at her from very close with her clear, sharp eyes.

"Be careful," Diana said. "Guard your mind. I'll clear the perimeter and meet you back here."

Lois nodded; she pulled away, and her hands slipped from beneath Diana's, but it took her a long time to break Diana's gaze.

A circuit of the property revealed a patch of the hedge that had been crushed, as though by a massive body heaving itself over the wall. It was a straight shot from that point to the garage, and—Diana chinned herself up on the wall for a moment, then dropped back down—a more straightforward route back to the drainage ditch than she and Lois had taken here. The flattened grass might have meant the serpent had been through recently, or it merely that it went through often; there was at least none of its noxious deterrent scent here. Two windows stood ajar on the mansion's second floor.

Diana circled back to the meeting point and searched the gathering for Lois. She was sidling up behind—oh, that was Galloway, watching several other attendees perform yoga on a mat that lolled like a tongue from the open front of a tent. A folded-up sheet of paper protruded from the back pocket of his pants; Lois bit her lip and eased it free with painstaking slowness. The moment it was in her hand, she made it disappear into her jacket, then backed away with absentminded casualness until she had reached the edge of the camp. When she was clear she turned and walked, then jogged, back to Diana, who pulled a bush aside to let her back into their hiding spot.

"Found this," Lois said a little breathlessly, unfolding the pamphlet she'd stolen. "Look familiar?"

It was Lois' turn this time to trace out the winding path of a labyrinth with her nail. The map of the camp showed activity tents interspersed among the sleeping accommodations. Arrows connected these, in less complex version of the structure that sprawled not-yet-built across the face of Metropolis. 

"The back side has some fun team-building affirmations," Lois said, "'translated from the original ancient Greek'. That's not even unusual. If I hadn't been chasing a snake monster with Wonder Woman all evening I wouldn't question it. I'd just drink my wheatgrass smoothie and move on to the next trust fall." Lois folded the paper up again and shoved it back into her coat. "What about you, what did you find?"

Diana looked at her thoughtfully as she handed Lois' camera back. The pamphlet had been emblazoned with the new Qualcuity logo, and Lois had made it disappear awfully quickly. "I found us a way in."

"Great. Lead the way."

"Lois," Diana said, "how would you feel if I took that paper from you and tore it up?"

Lois' face went slack with shock for an instant; then she grimaced. "That seems like an awful idea. I need it. Except I actually do need it, for the story, so I can't tell how much of that is just me. How do you write a story when one of the most significant graphic assets is too dangerous to print?"

"If the serpent is stopped, in one way or another, its symbols may lose their power."

"Well, I've found my motivation."

* * *

Lois gave a little _Whoa!_ when Diana boosted her through the open window. She'd been tensed as though to climb, not expecting Diana to keep lifting once her feet were up past shoulder height.

Diana would have to warn her, next time. If they did this again.

She tumbled into the house and, before Diana had time to worry, signaled down that the coast was clear. Scaling vinyl siding was a fool's game, and the windowframes creaked and gave alarmingly under Diana's weight, but it was enough to get her up to Lois. She helped Diana through a slit she'd cut in the windowscreen with a pocket knife she still held clamped in her teeth.

The window let them into an impersonal bedroom, a guest room in blue gingham and ruffles. The lights were out, and an ajar door led to a dark hallway. As soon as Diana was in, Lois folded and stowed her knife, then hurried to listen at the door. She pushed it a little wider after a moment, and stuck her head out in the hall.

"Did you see Landry out in the yard?" murmured Diana, moving up close close.

Lois shook her head. "I asked around, nobody had seen him for hours."

"Who else lives here?"

"It's just him."

"In this enormous house?"

"He needs the extra room for the snake," Lois said, and Diana leaned into her to muffle her laugh.

"So he is with it, perhaps," she said, "making his preparations. You may have been joking about him keeping it in his basement, but I do think it's likeliest that it's there or the garage." There was still no movement in the hallway; Diana pushed the door wider, and followed Lois into the hall and down the stairs.

The whole house was impersonal, like a series of showrooms for Landry's pedestrian tastes, not a home. They passed three more bedrooms and two sitting rooms with nearly identical furnishings. There were no signs of life, not even a pet, but when they reached the ground floor a hint of snake musk caught at the back of Diana's throat.

She was opening her mouth to mention this to Lois when the back door swung open, admitting the soft torchlight of the camp into the kitchen with them.

Lois seized Diana at once and shoved her against the kitchen counter. She dragged Diana's head down and kissed her.

"Oh jeez," the man in the doorway said. "Jeez, I'm so sorry. Ignore me, I just can't deal with the Porta Potties out there. I'm just going to sneak past you to the little boys' room and we can all pretend none of us was ever in here."

Diana obliged him. He was easy to ignore, with Lois all but climbing her again. She kissed greedily, digging her fingers into Diana's shoulders, like she had been starving for Diana all evening. Each of the day's quick touches, every moment when she'd watched Lois' desire strain against her reservations and hoped that they might break, came back to Diana at once, and she put her arms around Lois and pulled her directly off the floor just to be closer to her.

Lois braced her knees against the edge of the counter on either side of Diana, and her hands on the cabinet behind Diana's head. A minute ago this might have have seemed excessively forward, but there was no better way to hold Lois like this than by cradling her ass. When she felt hands there, Lois just bit eagerly at Diana's mouth and angled their hips closer together.

They were still kissing when the man crept back through. "Nice robe, by the way," he muttered, and shut the kitchen door behind himself.

This seemed to make no impression on Lois at all. She put a hand to Diana's face as they kissed; her thumb grazed Diana's bottom lip and her tongue retraced its path. Diana let her hand slip down the back of Lois' thigh, and the tiny sound in Lois' throat sent a flash of prickly heat through her.

The ruse had worked and the need for it had passed. They were here on a mission with an unclear timetable. It would be prudent to stop now.

Diana had been being prudent all day.

She cupped Lois' knee, then slid her hand back up her thigh—the front this time, following the inseam of Lois' jeans with her thumb. Lois was a brilliant woman who would surely put a stop to this nonsense before it got out of hand. She touched Lois' hip; she pressed her thumb into the inside of Lois' thigh at its apex. Lois only kissed Diana harder.

All right. Nonsense it was. Diana slipped her hand between Lois' legs, and Lois wriggled and pushed down against her. All Diana felt with her hand was the seam at the crotch of Lois' jeans, but the sound Lois made in her chest, the tension that rippled through her body, told her enough.

"Oh God," Lois said. She yanked at Diana's cloak until it fell open, and laughed breathlessly against Diana's mouth when her hands met Diana's breastplate. "God," she said again, "you're wearing _armor_. How do I even—" She drummed her fingers against the leather; it came to Diana as vibration, the impacts of her fingers but not the pressure. "Can you feel—"

"Next time, jeans," Diana said, then pulled Lois closer again. She rolled her knuckles and Lois rolled with her, pushing back against Diana's hand.

"Can't wait," Lois gasped, and let her forehead fall against Diana's shoulder. The downward grinding of her hips shoved Diana's hand hard against her own pelvis, but through the leather strips of her skirt there was no friction to be had—and oh did she want friction, she was feverishly ready for it, if they just changed positions Lois would be able to slip her quick strong hands beneath Diana's skirt and—

Lois bit Diana's ear and made a long sound, strangled almost to silence. A moment of tense stillness gave way to a powerful, wracking shudder that subsided in stages, until Lois went so slack in Diana's arms that her feet sagged back to the ground. She drew a vast breath and let it out with a laugh.

Diana kissed her throat and what little of her shoulder Lois' shirt and jacket gave access to, and held her upright until she found her feet. Lois stretched against her luxuriously and leaned up to kiss Diana's mouth. Her hands were just beginning to search for the edge of Diana's skirt when a tremor came up through the floor under their feet.

They looked at each other. Lois was flushed and bright-eyed and beautiful, and Diana could take her back upstairs right now to one of those soulless bedrooms with no one the wiser, if they didn't have to go down into the basement and confront a monster. The same realization played out on Lois' face. She grimaced, then leaned into Diana again and muffled a groan of frustration into Diana's neck. Her breath tickled Diana's collarbone; Diana's skin felt parched from lack of touch, her body constrained by her armor.

"All right," Diana said. She stroked the soft hair at the back of Lois' neck, where it wisped loose from her bun, and Lois shivered against her. "Let's just take care of this, and then—there are much better places, anyway."

"Thirty seconds ago, I'm not sure I would've agreed with you," Lois said, but she stepped back from Diana and yanked her jacket straight.

"I'm trying very hard to convince myself," Diana muttered. She pushed herself away from the counter and tried the handle on what she'd pegged as probably the basement door. It rattled in her hand: locked.

"I can pick—" Lois began, starting forward.

Diana twisted the knob off the door and tossed it in the sink.

"Never mind," Lois said.

Carpeted stairs led down into the soft lapping glow of candles, or a fire—the first light in the house from a source other than the moon and the camp outside, creeping in here and there through the windows. Diana took the stairs carefully, testing them for squeaks before she let them take her weight; Lois followed her with one hand on Diana's shoulder, and without prompting placed her feet only where Diana's had been.

Unlike the upper floors, the basement hadn't been decorated at all: it was an off-white box with a beige floor and its walls bare of anything but sports memorabilia. Track lighting threw harsh overlapping shadows. Descending into it revealed to Diana a wet bar along one wall, a pool table, an enormous television that faced a couch across a stretch of carpet marked by the feet of an absent coffee table, and finally the altar.

Landry knelt before it: the missing coffee table, draped with fabric. As he came into view he was just raising his hands, one of them empty but cupped in supplication, the other holding a wavy-bladed dagger that looked mass-produced and roughly the sharpness of a butter knife.

Beyond him, filling the far end of the room from floor to ceiling, lay the serpent.

It was large as Diana had thought, so large she could not have encompassed its body with her arms. Its great bulk writhed in the meager space of Landry's basement, enmeshing the stripes of brown and gold and white on its gleaming hide. Just as Lois had predicted, its body split several feet behind the head, into a whole nest's worth of necks that each ended in a head the length of Diana's arm. The heads weaved independently, flicking a forest of tongues at Landry. It was hypnotic, and it was the only beauty Diana had seen in this house that hadn't come in with her.

Diana held up a hand to stop Lois where she stood on the stairs. The serpent more or less faced them; it would see Diana, and for the moment it might be best if it remain unaware of Lois' presence.

Or maybe she shouldn't have worried. She reached the bottom of the staircase and stood in the open, but the serpent seemed wholly enthralled by Landry: it watched him with with each of its pairs of eyes, touched him gently with the very tips of tongue after tongue after tongue. He was speaking to it rapidly, rhythmically, in the Koine Greek of Alexander's empire:

"How sharply your many eyes follow even a moving target ... how skillfully you drill down into the truths of the earth...."

His pronunciation was atrocious.

Behind Diana, Lois' camera clicked. The flash filled the room for an instant. Even this didn't draw the serpent's attention, but it did make Landry falter in the middle of a sentence. He half-turned to look for the source of the light, and the attention of all the serpent's heads snapped up toward Diana simultaneously. Its many jaws closed; the pupils of its fist-sized eyes dilated.

Diana looked up at the ceiling and sighed. Well, she could have foreseen this.

"Good evening," she said. "I am Diana of Themyscira, and it is my honor to meet you both."

"What the fuck are you doing in my house?" barked Landry in English, backing up until his heel struck the coffee table. It and the cloth on it were stained with something Diana was glad she could not smell. Her nose was overwhelmed instead with the odor of the serpent, not its skunky deterrent reek but the scent of the animal itself: cleaner, a living smell, but not pleasant.

"You didn't even lock the back door," Lois said, and photographed him again. "Which I wish we'd known when we were getting in here. Not expecting your bosses to have the initiative to break in, huh? What are you doing to their minds?"

"Lois," Diana hissed. "Excuse our intrusion," she went on, speaking louder for the ears of the serpent and its priest. "We learned of your presence in Metropolis just recently, and we are here to greet you, to welcome you, and to make sure you and the humans here cause each other no harm."

Landry opened his mouth again, but seemed to choke on his own words. His expression contorted; his shoulders twitched. One of the serpent's triangular heads jerked down toward him, and its split jaws worked. Then, in a very different voice, in a very different accent, Landry said, "No harm. They are mine. Cherished and exalted."

"Jesus," Lois said under her breath. Then, projecting her voice, "Did they agree to that?"

"My colleague is right to ask. The people of this era are unprepared for legends. Have you made yourself known to them?"

"All will know me," the serpent said through Landry, struggling with each sound.

"That's a no," Lois muttered. Her camera clicked like a metronome.

"Would you start with me, then?" said Diana, over her. "May I know your name, great serpent?"

"Ladon," Landry moaned. "Ladon of the garden of the Hesperides, Ladon the guardian of the apples, Ladon hatched of Typhon and Ceto, Ladon the forgotten and forsaken. All will know me. All will hear and speak."

"Doesn't Hercules kill the snake that guards the apples?" said Lois, sotto voce.

"What?" said Landry—in his own voice, but he sounded drowsy and confused. He could more or less hear them at that volume, but maybe the serpent could not.

"Only in the _Argonautica_ ," Diana said over her shoulder. "Elsewhere he tricks Atlas to get them."

"Right. I might have brushed up on my Greek snake monsters instead of sleeping last night." Lois raised her voice. "What do you say to Apollonius Rhodius' allegations that you're dead?"

Half the serpent's mouths hissed; Landry shook in place like a ragdoll in a giant's grip. "Lies!" he blurted in Ladon's distorted voice, haloed by Ladon's many faces. "Fictions!"

"Of course," Diana said, holding up a placating hand. "I greet and welcome you, Ladon. We are of the same time and perhaps the same blood, and I would like nothing better than to hear the story that brought you here to Metropolis. But these people belong to themselves, and I won't let you have them."

Ladon hissed again. Its massive body flexed and bunched. Landry dropped to the floor like his strings had been cut. Diana reached out to shove Lois behind herself, but the serpent's heads swerved sharply away from them. With a tremendous cracking and splintering, with an explosion of wood and gypsum, Ladon dived headfirst through the wall of the basement and into the garage.

For something so massive, it was _fast_. It poured the yards and yards of its striped body through the hole, muscling aside the Humvee and the sports car on the other side. Amidst the electronic howling of vehicle alarms, it burst through the metal door of the garage and into the yard. Through the makeshift tunnel came the first of the screams.

Diana threw off her cloak and gave chase. She heard Lois scramble after her.

Ladon hit the camp like a bowling ball, scattering tents and terrified Qualcuity managers, overturning card tables and the smoothie machine. It slithered a loop around a knot of fleeing people, fencing them in with its bulk, and turned all its faces upon them. They cowered away from the flicking ends of its tongues, but there was nowhere for them to go.

With no singular face to kick it in, Diana had to content herself with the juncture of its necks. She leapt and caught it about the base of one head—it barely sagged with her weight—and let momentum carry her lower body forward; she drove her boot hard into the place where the serpent's body forked.

The whole vast beast recoiled with pain. Snake jaws snapped at her; one butted her hard, trying to dislodge her. Ladon was not deterred from its victims. Half its heads still focused on the humans who cowered in its coils, and one of them, a man in pajamas and an open bathrobe, was as fixed on it as it was on them. His mouth gaped; his hand reached. Ladon's nearest head jerked downwards and the man jerked with it.

In one motion, Diana drew her sword and struck off the head. The man Ladon had enthralled convulsed backward into the arms of one of his coworkers before the serpent could use him to speak. Blood splattered his face and robe.

Ladon's body snapped like a whip and Diana, clinging to its smooth hide with just one hand now, was flung free. She skipped like a stone over water, demolishing tents and tearing up sod. Lightbulbs shattered; torches guttered out as they fell.

She heard Lois, not as far away as she should be: "Hey!"

Diana rolled to her feet. Ladon's thrashings had freed the captives corralled by its body and they fled together, dragging each other along by hands and sleeves. The serpent was still shuddering, still wracked by the agony of its decapitation, but the bleeding had stopped and the stump of the neck already bulged with new tissue. 

The serpent turned and plunged after its would-be worshipers. Diana snatched up a torch that lay smoldering on the grass near her and leapt to meet it, a fifty-foot arc that buried her sword crosswise in one of its necks. Her momentum and the force of their collision dragged Ladon off its course and bore that head nearly to the ground. When her feet touched grass she pivoted and wrenched the hilt of her sword.

The blade cut muscle, cut bone, and the head parted from its neck. Blood arced from the stump, but the bleeding lasted less time than it took Diana to thrust the torch in her off hand into the wound. Ladon recoiled, snapping, before she could properly cauterize it. The other neck she'd decapitated was thickening, beginning to bifurcate.

"Hey!" shouted Lois again, and there she was, standing in the wreckage of the camp while Qualcuity employees scattered around her. She waved something white at Ladon—the pamphlet she'd pickpocketed earlier. "Listen!"

Ladon's attention wavered toward Lois. In that instant of distraction, Diana launched herself into the thicket of its necks again and buried her sword in the softer scales where they met. While this anchor lasted, she applied the ember of her torch liberally to the second stump. Ladon slammed its heads into the ground with seismic, teeth-rattling force, and Diana's sword slipped free; she cut a shallow score along one of its necks as she lost purchase, and then she was skidding away across the grass again, to fetch up in the remains of one of the white egg-tents.

The serpent had lost two heads and gained two: Diana was right back where she started. She needed to do better than this and she needed to do it quickly.

"How supremely you empower your team," Lois yelled, in Greek. She seemed to be reading it phonetically, but her accent was still better than Landry's.

Diana fought off the enveloping nylon tent canopy and regained her feet. Her sword was still in hand, but she'd lost her torch. All of Ladon's heads had oriented on Lois: blood still ran from the wound Diana had left at the base of its necks, but at the speaking of those words it had dismissed the woman with the sword and every intention of killing it to attend to its worshiper. If they hadn't drawn Landry's attention, back in the basement, maybe Ladon would never have cared about their presence there at all.

And the blood still ran. The lumpy end of the first neck she had decapitated showed the structure of the skulls developing in it, the dark spots where eyes would be, but a stab wound delivered elsewhere still bled.

"What value you return for investment," Lois read from the pamphlet. Now that she had Ladon's attention, she spoke more softly. The serpent swayed closer to her to hear it, until it was close enough for the tips of its tongues to brush her coat and jeans, until its heads surrounded her in an arc like she was a performer on a stage. Her shoulders drew in tight and her eyes flicked sideways to Diana's, but she went on in a clear, steady voice, "How insightful your judgements of risk and reward."

Diana sheathed her sword and unhooked her lasso from her belt. Its familiar friendly warmth ignited in her hand. She ran for Ladon with the lasso trailing out behind her.

The serpent didn't spare a look for her as she approached, or when she dropped to the grass and slid beneath its many necks; it didn't glance up at the glowing cord that arced over it and found Diana's free hand on the other side. But when she cinched the lasso tight, oh, that caught its attention.

Lois was still reading from its pamphlet, and at first it fought Diana just to keep its eyes on Lois. It flinched against the lasso like a person shrugging away a fly; it snapped at Diana idly with a couple of its mouths. She swatted a head away with one bracer and wound the ends of her lasso around the other, then dug her heels in and dragged Ladon inch by thrashing inch away from Lois.

"There are other ways," Diana said to Ladon, raising her voice for its serpent ears to hear. "There are new ways of being in this world, and I will help you find one, if you just let me. You can have devotion, and peace, and much better poetry. All you have to do is ask instead of taking."

Ladon convulsed against the lasso. Diana redoubled her hold, though the force of its struggle dragged her across the grass, tearing up sod. One head among its many jerked; she thought it was moving to bite her again, until she heard Lois' unwavering, undaunted voice falter.

"... how far ... outside the box ... your thoughts travel," Lois read in Greek. Ladon's head jerked again and she twitched up onto her toes, gasping. She'd carried the paperweight with her all day; she had probably walked part of the small campsite labyrinth. And just like that, Ladon hooked her. "—what hay you make—when the sun shines—no—no—"

" _Let her go_ ," Diana thundered.

"All will know me," Lois said in Ladon's voice. "All will know and hear and speak, even liars such as—even liars—release me—release— _get out you scaly prehistoric fuck_ —"

Diana drew her sword and struck Ladon just below its necks. The blade bit through scale, through skin, into the smooth muscular cylinder of its body. Pain traveled the full length of the serpent like an earthquake. She planted her foot against the lasso and yanked it tighter, then drew back and struck again. This time her sword jarred against bone. On the next blow, it cut through and back into meat.

"Lois!" she called. In this day she seldom prayed, but she prayed now, that she had not stayed her hand too long, that Lois' mind was intact. "Torch!"

Ladon's heads came away from its body by grisly inches. Its death throes scattered what was left of Landry's temple-camp and thumped the earth like titans' feet. The process was not as bloody as it should have been; arteries closed, scar tissue appeared with preternatural speed. But it did bleed, and no new head tried to emerge. Ladon bit at her, but the tight-bound bundle of its necks didn't have the reach it needed, and its fangs sparked uselessly off her armor.

"Lois—" Diana began, but this time Lois' voice answered her at once, and blessedly close:

"Got one!"

Diana dropped her sword and Lois put the torch in her hand. Smoke rose from the wound as she cauterized it, and Ladon twitched its last.

The golden light faded from her lasso; she unwound it from around Ladon's heads and returned it to her belt. Her sword still lay at her feet. She'd get it in a moment. Lois must have retreated to safety after delivering the torch to Diana, but she picked her way back to Diana's side. They stood elbow to elbow until Lois' knees gave out. Diana caught her and set her back on her feet.

"That sucked," Lois said crisply.

"I'm very pleased you're all right."

"Perry's going to have a field day with this story. He really doesn't like it when I help kill the alleged perpetrator."

"Will you be able to publish?"

Lois snorted. "Turning my stories down doesn't work."

They surveyed their handiwork together under the turning stars, by the light of a few unbroken bulbs and a tiki torch that still stood at the edge of what had almost been a temple. Voices and, farther off, sirens came to them over the wall. Lois lay her head on Diana's shoulder, and let out a long, heavy sigh.

"Hey," Lois said, eventually. "What happened to Landry?"

* * *

He lay pinned under a joist that had fallen during Ladon's catastrophic exit from his basement. Blood ran from a cut on his scalp, but his pupils contracted when Diana pulled back his eyelid, and, rousing a little, he tried to jerk his head out of her hand.

"How dare you," Landry said indistinctly, shoving at the beam; clouds of drywall dust billowed up from his clothing. "This is my _home_ , this is a holy place you desecrated with—"

Lois leaned into his face with her camera. "Would you care to go on the record about that?"

* * *

"Oh my god," Lois said when she answered the door, "I'm in my pajamas." With snowflakes on them, which weren't quite in season yet. Her hair was tied back. At some point last night, she'd acquired a scratch on her jaw.

"I hope it's because you were sleeping," Diana said.

"My only goal for this, whatever, for interacting with you is to one day be dressed so that we look like we're going to the same place. Come on in. Try not to look at ... anything."

Lois' apartment was airy and simply furnished. Every wall and surface announced her presence: with art, with framed front pages, with old Polaroids, with stacks of manuscripts that dripped red ink, with the smell of developing fluid, with a forgotten sweater that had migrated into the clefts of the couch. Diana had to curb her urge to explore.

"Your home is lovely," she said.

"You're kind," Lois said, kicking a sock under an armchair. She cut her eyes at the bottle of champagne in Diana's hands. "Is that—"

"Oh, yes," Diana said, extending it. "I thought you might want to celebrate. And I brought one other thing." She produced a folded sheet of glossy paper from inside her jacket.

"You didn't," Lois said. She made a beeline for the Qualcuity pamphlet and swiped it from Diana's hand. "God, you did. I dropped mine in all the confusion last night. You're _amazing_."

"I feel much the same about you," Diana said.

Lois gave an uneasy, wavering laugh and took the champagne from Diana as well: it gave her an excuse to turn away. On the way to the kitchen she tossed the pamphlet onto the coffee table, next to a laptop and a listing stack of Qualcuity detritus. Diana followed Lois into the kitchen, and watched her busy herself putting the bottle in the freezer to chill, then pulling down two flutes and wiping some imagined speck from them. She un-spelled some refrigerator magnet profanity, ran the dishcloth along the edge of the counter, and at last just stood with her shoulders clenched and her fingers digging into the edge of the sink.

Diana came up behind her slowly, letting her shoes click on the floor to announce her approach, and leaned against the counter next to Lois. "I didn't mean to upset you," she said. "Your feelings about me seem mixed. I'd like to understand why."

Lois faked a smile. "It's not you. I just didn't answer the door expecting to have to deal with sincerity. So, what's the story, are Qualcuity logos safe now? I tried to test it on myself, but it's really hard to tell whether you're a supernatural amount of obsessed with something, or just a reasonable amount."

"I ran it past a friend, who—" Diana wrinkled her nose. "He presents a similar problem, but I believe, provisionally, that all the documents and images you have are safe."

"Was this before or after your friend showed up in his hovercraft to steal the snake corpse? That one feels off-brand, by the way."

"Some bats do hover," Diana said.

"Why do you sound like you've had _several_ conversations about this?"

"I shouldn't say."

"Uh-huh. Can you get me an interview?"

"I might, if you stop changing the subject."

"I just did this," Lois blurted. The moment it was out, she seemed to resign herself to talking about it. She sighed and threw the dishcloth in the sink, then pushed herself away from the counter, and confronted Diana from the center of her small open-plan kitchen. "I _just_ did this. It ended the worst possible way, and that was only two years ago.

"Firstly—" Lois ticked her points off on her fingers. "—if I have to have a type, this is the most embarrassing one to have. Second, how do you deal with the ramifications of having— _this_ —" Her gesture encompassed Diana and most of the refrigerator. "—in your life? What are the ethical implications of someone like you caring about me more than you care about some random person on the street? What happens to our relationship if it gets in the way of what you do? What if it doesn't? Will I be too dead to care?

"And if I'm not dead—how does anyone get to the point where they're a big enough person to deal with that?"

As Lois talked, Diana gravitated slowly closer to her, until they were close enough for Diana to touch her shoulder. Lois' eyes drifted closed.

"You're right to ask," Diana said. "I've asked myself these questions too."

Lois took a shaky breath. "Any answers?"

"Many, some of which I think you'll find inadequate."

"Not really what I was hoping to hear."

"We can give each other no better than our best," Diana said. "We're fortunate our best is unusually good."

Lois laughed, and opened her eyes just before Diana kissed her. It was their first unhurried kiss, a chance to discover each other. Lois went up on her toes for it, and her hands came up to find Diana's loose hair, the warm space under the back of her jacket. Diana stroked Lois' throat, her collarbone, and trailed the backs of her fingers down between Lois' breasts; she felt the catch of Lois' breath.

"Do you hear that?" said Diana.

"Mm?" said Lois, practically into her mouth.

"Footsteps approaching."

"The hell—"

"However will we avoid discovery?" said Diana, taking Lois by the arms.

"Oh my god," Lois muttered, but a tremor of amusement ran through her voice. "Well, I've recently picked up this surefire technique...."

When Diana lifted her, she hung on, and let herself be carried, laughing, to the bedroom.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for your lovely creator letter, AceQueenKing. As you can see from the wordcount, some of your ideas really got their hooks in me. I hope you have a great exchange -- see you next round!
> 
> Title, and some corporate buzzwordage, from [Pepsi Geometries](https://www.goldennumber.net/wp-content/uploads/pepsi-arnell-021109.pdf), a leaked Pepsi logo design document that does not contain a single word of English.
> 
> This fic wouldn't have been possible without an army of enablers, cheerleaders and readers. Thank you all!


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